Structuring Scholarly Discourse: A Six-Dimensional Meta-Framework for Academic Manuscripts

Abstract

Academic writing instruction has traditionally relied on structural conventions such as the Introduction–Methods–Results–and–Discussion (IMRaD) format, genre-based move analysis, and discipline-specific style guides. While these frameworks address discrete aspects of scholarly composition, they rarely offer writers, particularly novice, doctoral, and multilingual researchers, an integrated, sequential model that links contextual framing to disciplinary voice. This conceptual article undertakes an integrative review of the academic writing, genre analysis, and scholarly identity literatures to propose a six-dimensional meta-framework: Context, Scope, Method, Evidence, Structure, and Voice (CSMESV), that positions manuscript development as a cumulative, recursive process rather than a template to be filled in. Each dimension is theorized through synthesis of the extant literature and mapped onto specific decision points that authors, supervisors, and journal reviewers encounter across the writing lifecycle. The article situates the framework in relation to existing structural models, including IMRaD and the symmetry-of-specificity model, as well as genre-based move analysis and discoursal-identity scholarship. It further considers the emerging role of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools as scaffolds for applying the model, rather than as substitutes for scholarly judgment, and illustrates the framework's application through worked examples drawn from business, management, and social science manuscript types. The article contributes a parsimonious, transferable heuristic for academic writing pedagogy, doctoral supervision, and manuscript preparation across disciplines, and outlines an agenda for empirically validating the model in future research.